19 March, 2006

For a while now, I’ve been running Akismet on this WordPress installation.

I hate being spammed, and I’m sure most of you, too, despise the glop of text these idiots try to flavor your weblogs with.
So far, it looks like Akismet’s done an excellent job of managing, too. My friends can comment, are rarely ever caught in the filter (I check its queue every few days or so), and the spam gets molested like it should.

I prefer this to drDave’s Spam Karma 2, as well.
It’s not that SK2 doesn’t work. It’s that I think it works a bit too well, and I’m not entirely sure / comfortable in configuring it. I’m just not good enough at tuning it to not block my friends, and block my enemies.

Ah, well.

The only dig about Akismet is, you have to have a WordPress.com account to get the API key needed to make it work.
I at least have said account, so it wasn’t a problem to switch to it and set it up.
I like the hands-off approach to the plugin - just plug it in and let it play. That’s why Akismet is for me, but it may not be for everyone. I thought there were too many options for me in Spam Karma 2.

But hey, in the end, if it does what I need, I’m happy.

So, I’ve been running Google Analytics on this blog for a bit. Forgot how long, really. I just put the code in a while back, and didn’t look back.

I had a look at my stats a little earlier today. I find that I’m not the most popular person on the internet, and this is fine with me. Personally, I’d like to be able to serve pages faster to visitors, which seems to be one of the current issues. I’ve planned on enabling the caching plugin for WordPress again, because it seems to be needed, and may actually help out on speed, since WordPress requests so much stuff per pagehit.

It seems I’ve got a lot of people who bounce in, then bounce out from here. It just means I’m not all that interesting. I’m fine with that, too. I’m trying to avoid the trend that seems to be what the blogosphere is — digest a chunk of news, regurgitate it for the masses. I don’t want my blog to be that. I want it to be content that either is all me, or something that I found of high interest that is worth reposting.

I think that was one of my problems with Livejournalers and their memes - everyone was doing the same meme, and I’d see ten, twenty, or even a hundred of the exact same thing. However, while memes are easy enough to ignore, or even succumb to from time to time (see my sidebar), news is everywhere, and won’t go away as quickly as you’d like.

Perhaps I should be dragging in dirt from all around South Tampa, and posting it here, though I won’t be in this part of town much longer. In fact, I should be blogging about my move, and finding out my new ICBM data, so that I can actually have my posts mark my new location once we move.

I also feel a little disappointed.
Forty recorded visitors in three days, and no-one has clicked on the ‘blog that is renting space from me. I don’t want this person to feel like he wasted his credits trying to get some clicky love.

I should go earn myself a few credits, too - I could use a little more traffic. Someone might find the ramblings of this South Tampa lunatic a bit more enjoyable.